The Professor jabbed buttons, nodded meaningfully to Hasbro and I, and then reached across and heaved on a bloody great anti-something-or-other crank with silver wires sprouting from it like tentacles. There was a wild crash and clatter and a cacophonous whir reminiscent of a scourge of locusts setting up for a concert. In that moment there was a muffled explosion that brought the Professor up short. “What…?” he began to ask, but the entire tower quivered like a column of aspic, and we jolly well ripped out through the roofless roof like a comet trailing a universe of sparks.
I’ll admit that I myself was smug in my ignorance, and not only about our having given the pig men the slip. I had a hand, you see, in making earth safe from their depredations: we were more than a match for a gaggle of ill-dressed loonies. I could visualize them leaping to their feet about now, from where they were hunkered down in Chingford Forest, punching each other on the shoulder, leaping up and running hatless onto the meadow. Imagine my surprise when that’s precisely what I did see, not forty feet below us.
Odd thing, spaceships, they have these gyro gizmos that make a chap feel right side up in spite of the fact that he’s not — saves him a good deal of uneasiness, I suppose. It took a moment, then, for me to understand what had happened. The aliens, apparently, had chucked in one of their fizz bombs just as we launched our craft, and the concussion in the base of the tower had cannoned us upward, setting the bloody ship mad. Dials were spinning like whirligigs, and St. Ives was a veritable octopus, arms flailing hither and yon in an effort to stabilize our madcap flight.
The ship capered along haywire above the green, and the pig men, dressed for a masquerade, ran in a wild rout in our wake, carrying lighted torches. St. Ives and Hasbro enlivened the necessary retros and stabilizers, and we banked into one last side-crushing loop before bowling off westward toward the common. Pig men gave way to costumed Boy Scouts about then, several hundred of the blighters on the evening march, who broke and ran like mice as we flew overhead, all shot up with flame and whizzing a universe of parti-colored sparks. We were out of sight quickly enough after setting aflame several score of tents, and (here I only speculate from newspaper accounts) the Scouts were regrouping when from over the rise, led by a gigantic alien dressed as a cartoon devil, came the pig men, shouting unfathomable drivel and brandishing torches.
The rest of the Chingford Common fracas is history, and a dozen wild and equally unlikely stories have been offered by unfortunate witnesses, so I won’t say more about it except that none of those stories holds a candle to the truth, which, the philosopher tells us, is often the case. As for the ship, we managed to yank it up into the proper trajectory and, through the skills of science and the will of God, raced outward through the void toward the black hole that yawned like a tunnel of infamy off the port side of Mars.
In truth, there’s not much more to say — not yet anyway. We whizzed along for six days before it occurred to me to ask the Professor just how long we’d be engaged in our modest heroics. He was evasive. That is to say, he hinted that the mission might be a protracted one indeed, and that the business of shutting a door sometimes requires stepping through that door and slamming it firmly shut behind one — a notion that in my weakness I understood to have been revealed to me in what might be called an untimely fashion, if you follow me.
On the thirteenth day, late in the long and lightless afternoon, with Earth in our wake reduced to a speck of flame in the vast heavens, we saw the orbicular shadow of what a futuristic poet might, in his paroxysms of language, call something slightly more grand than a simple black hole: an ebony hiatus, perhaps, the looming mouth of a dark destiny encircled by a whirling vaporous darkness and shot through with rainbow lights as if a thousand twirling prisms danced above the abyss.
“There she blows,” Hasbro muttered helpfully, mixing grog in a chemical beaker.
“Still a good way off,” I responded, awestruck by the sight and helping myself to the contents of the beaker.
“Its appearance is deceptive,” said the Professor, winking at me. “It looks as if it’s a thousand miles across from this distant perspective, when actually it’s a tiny thing, not much broader, shall we say, than the base of this ship, although all talk of breadth is purely conceptual. You see, Jack, there are walls.”
“I was sure there were!” I shouted, slightly illuminated by the grog. And I told him about the dream and old Sidcup Catford and the rock wall. The Professor saw more merit in my metaphoric dreaming than I had anticipated. Space, it turns out, is just that: a void peopled by an occasional star or a family or two of meteorites or a misanthropic comet. Our mistake is to suppose that life exists out among the stars that we discern in the night sky. It’s out there, all right, but behind a wall, through a door, as it were, a door through which Birdlip and Kraken had plunged in their own star vehicle, unwittingly leaving it open behind them not unlike the door of the proverbial barn.
“A glass of grog with you, sir,” Hasbro said, handing across the beaker for what might have been the sixth time. I filled my glass and drank it off, realizing as it settled its fiery weight in the pit of my stomach that I was drunk as a lord and with none of the wealth to go with it.
“If we fail, Jacky, don’t expect to see either of us this side of Paradise,” the Professor said. “We’ll be strangers in a filthy strange land.”
“I say,” I said, trying to rise. “What’s this we and you? We’re a company!” My legs, apparently, had turned to jelly, for I remained helplessly in my seat. Hasbro and the Professor donned lead shoes and strode to the hatch, which led below to the ’tween deck, as it were. I tried to throw myself from the loungette, for I saw their intention as clear as rainwater, and I would have damn well followed them but for the physics of leaden rum and leadless shoes.
“Take heart, Jacky boy,” the Professor said. “Let the craft bear you home. Watch for us when the moon is one day past full and Mars rises above the horizon in the early evening.” With that utterance they disappeared through the hatch, and that’s the last I’ve seen of Professor St. Ives and his man Hasbro. I sat like a pudding, stupefied in my chair, listening for a time to a banging and clattering from below. Abruptly there came a lurch and crash and the whirl and swoosh of a great flaming exhalation through the scuttle that bespoke the jettisoning of the forward section. I and my capsule arced away in a trajectory that would ultimately point my prow toward home and the long plunging fall.
Through the glass, as my ship came around on a broad tack, I could see the double aft section hurtling toward the lee shore of Mars, carrying in it two of England’s — aye, of the world’s — greatest men: heroes to the core. I could do nothing but watch in mute wonder as they plunged toward the dark and whirling vortex of the hole. Their ship, now a cone with the top shorn off, broke again in two, the massive lower section towing, if that’s the word, on the end of what appeared to be a long chain of highly polished droplets of metal. The sides of that aft section fell away and tumbled slowly off into the emptiness, baring the massive cork that I had occasion to comment upon previously.
And so, the heavens revolving around her, her conical bowsprit pointed into that gullet of dark mystery, she sailed into temporary oblivion, hauling behind her an incredible cork etched with an equally incredible and, I must say, vastly inspiring legend: “Fitzall Sizes” — a legend that might as easily define the vast capacities of those two forthright and intrepid adventurers.